Free Tool: Google Trends To Measure Trends In Traffic and Searches
By Anna Johnson on June 26th, 2008Move over Alexa (and Comcast, Comscore and Quantcast) – Google has just released a tool – Google Trends – which displays trends in the number of visits per website and the number of searches per keyword.
Oops – before you get too excited, there are some limitations to the tool. Firstly, it doesn’t use actual traffic or search data, but instead uses a combination of aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. Good for privacy advocates… not so good if you want to know exactly how much traffic your competitors’ websites are receiving! Secondly, the tool seems to only track very popular websites and search terms.
On the positive side, Google Trends allows you to choose both the time frame and the specific region you wish to track – very useful if your market is regional. And if you have a Google webmaster account, you can also see the number of visitors or searches (as the case may be). Plus, there are future plans to enable you to export this data.
I recommend using Google Trends as one of the tools in your arsenal for performing market and competitive analysis. In case the tool disappoints, however, you may be pleased to know that Mozilla – the makers of Firefox – also have a traffic/search data tool in the works.
Word is that Mozilla’s tool will provide more accurate data on traffic and searches since it will be based on the actual browsing habits of Firefox users. Of course, the search habits of Firefox users may differ from those of general browser users, but with some 18 percent of the browser market these days, Firefox is certainly progressing towards mainstream use.
Click here to use Google Trends
November 15th, 2008 at 7:18 pm
I use google trends in differents way. Its easy to findout hot topics on on the web. I try to write on those topics and pickup some traffic from search engine. This tools makes blogging easy..